ABSTRACT
While in 1950, 30% of the world’s population lived in urban areas, in 2014, more than half (>54%) of the world’s population is urban, and the urban population is projected to reach 66% by 2050. However, this projected growth is not evenly distributed: rather, 90% of the increase will take place in Africa and Asia (UN/DESA, 2014). Worldwide, about 25–30% of the urban population is involved in the agro-food sector (Orsini et al., 2013) while in developing countries, the number of urban dwellers who engage in some form of agriculture can be much higher such as 45% in Lusaka, Zambia, 68% in the five biggest cities of Tanzania and even 80% in Brazzaville, Congo (Shackleton et al., 2009). The figure is 42% in Guatemalan cities and 68% in Nicaragua, while in Asian countries, it varies from 11% in Indonesia to 70% in Vietnam (Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010). Urban agriculture, being defined as the production of agricultural products (crops or livestock) in a homestead or plot in an urban or peri-urban area, is in most cases an informal activity and therefore rather challenging to describe with accurate figures and trends (Orsini et al., 2013). In fact, most research studies on private gardens have so far taken place in developed countries and only recently have studies on the biodiversity of urban gardens in tropical developing cities begun to arise (Goddard et al., 2009). Following a review of urban agriculture in developed countries (Mok et al., 2014), the study of Hamilton et al. (2014) attempted to estimate the number of households engaged in urban crop production in developing countries in 2010, both as a total and also per region. In total, 266 million households were assessed, including 29 million in Africa, 182 million in Asia, 39 million in Latin America and 15 million in Eastern Europe (Hamilton et al., 2014).
